The Directorate member and intellectual Nathan Hull is appalled by this behavior. He recognizes these Worldcraft bubbles as a substitute for man’s desire to discover new things and be in control, but Worldcraft doesn’t truly satisfy this urge and that energy turns destructive. 

Hull introduces a bill to outlaw Worldcraft on the humanitarian grounds that these are real lives being destroyed, but it is overwhelmingly defeated. Just then Terran Spaceways announces the discovery of a civilization in the Proxima system. This means Worldcraft will now be abandoned as humans can direct their energies outward toward new worlds.

As Hull and his girlfriend leave the Directorate Hall they hear about an enormous earthquake that demolished the newly constructed transportation tube across the Pacific. Only Hull seems to understand the horrible implication that they might be in an artificial bubble world themselves. 

Cast of characters

• Nathan Hull – member of the Directorate and the Intellectual class
• Julia Marlow – Hull’s girlfriend
• Bart Longstreet – works for Terran Spaceways. Member of the Industrial class
• Lora Becker – wins the Worldcraft contest party
• Eldon von Stern – Directorate Floor Leader
• Forrest Packman – inventor of the Worldcraft bubbles

The post The Trouble With Bubbles appeared first on the world Dick made.

This published version is too novelistic, at least by modern screenplay standards, but if it wasn’t there wouldn’t be much of a draw in reading a screenplay for an unproduced movie. It seems to exist only for the curiosity seekers and completists among us, since the story and characters are nearly the same as in the book, except for some additional scenes at the end where Ella Runciter is reborn.

Ubik does appear destined though to make it to the screen in some way or another. The producer of the film adaptation of A Scanner Darkly had optioned Ubik in the early 2000s, Michel Gondry was in the beginning stages of developing a movie in 2011, and in 2018 yet another screenplay was being developed with a new writer and producers.

Cast of characters

• Glen Runciter – owner of Runciter Associates, an anti-psi prudence organization
• Ella Runciter – Glen’s dead wife in half-life
• Herbert Schoenheit von Vogelsang – owner of Beloved Brethren Moratorium.
• Jory Miller – a dead fifteen-year-old boy in half-life cold-pac storage
• Raymond Hollis – employs telepaths. Runciter’s opposition
• G. G. Ashwood – one of Runciter’s telepaths
• Joe Chip – Runciter’s electrical tester
• Pat Conley– an anti-precog
• Stanton Mick – reclusive speculator and financier
• Zoe Wirt – Stanton Mick’s assistant
• Tippy Jackson, Edie Dorn, Al Hammond, John Ild, Francesca Spanish, Tito Apostos, Don Denny, Sammy Mundo, Wendy Wright, Fred Zafsky – Runciter’s inertials

The post Ubik: The Screenplay appeared first on the world Dick made.

The initial world constructed by the ship takes Kemmings back to when he was married with his first wife Martine, but Kemmings’s mind rejects it. The second world goes farther back in his subconscious to an incident during his childhood when he helped his cat kill a bird. This world, like the others to come, is also rejected because of Kemmings’s deep-seated neurotic anxieties.

The ship decides to simulate a world on the colony planet as if they’ve already arrived. Kemmings’s mind sees through this phony setup too as the scenario plays out again and again. When they finally do arrive in the real world, where the ship has arranged his first wife Martine to greet them, Kemmings still believes he is trapped in the loop of simulated realities.

This story was originally published under the title “Frozen Journey” in Playboy in 1980.

Cast of characters

• The ship’s A.I.
• Victor Kemmings – an emigrant on his way to the colony planet LR4-6
• Martine – Kemmings’s first wife

The post I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon appeared first on the world Dick made.

The Communist Party (in an alternate-future North America under Communist rule) is hiding the true nature of reality from the population through the use of hallucinogens in the water supply.

Tung Chien sees through this phony world after being slipped an anti-hallucinogenic drug by members of a revolutionary group and proceeds to find out that the Absolute Benefactor is actually a horrible, god-like evil entity.

This one certainly feels like a bad trip. Dick has written enough stories along these lines that it’s remarkable how much he downplayed the significance of LSD as an inspiration in his writing process.

Cast of characters

• Tung Chien – works for the Postwar Ministry of Cultural Artifacts
• Darius Pethel – headmaster of a new school of indoctrination. This is also the name of the owner of Pethel Jiffi-scuttler Sales & Service in The Crack in Space
• Ssu-Ma Tso-pin – Chien’s supervisor
• Tanya Lee – member of a revolutionary group
• The Absolute Benefactor – the Communist Party leader

The post Faith of Our Fathers appeared first on the world Dick made.

When Milt travels back to Earth after his successful Martian terraforming project he finds his suspicions confirmed. The Proxmen have constructed an elaborate illusion that life on Earth has continued so they can lure the human engineers back to their home planet in order to now terraform it for Prox, since the oceans were vaporized during the war.

Milt eventually resigns himself to this reality and heads back to Mars with a kitten, the titular precious artifact which is itself part of the Prox simulation, something Milt doesn’t recognize.

Cast of characters

• Milt Biskle – a terraforming engineer on Mars
• Dr. DeWinter – Milt’s psychiatrist
• Mary Ableseth – Milt’s tour guide companion back on Earth

The post Precious Artifact appeared first on the world Dick made.

A group of sightseers at a particle accelerator falls through a proton beam when a platform collapses. As they imagine they recover they actually wake into a chain of worlds created in the mind of each individual as they regain consciousness one by one.

In the first half of the book they are trapped in the mind of war veteran Arthur Silvester whose world is ruled by an Old Testament-like god, the titular eye in the sky.* After incapacitating Silvester the group progresses through several more worlds until there is a twist around whether or not Hamilton’s wife is a Communist sympathizer, a question the book begins with when Hamilton is fired from his job at a missile research facility over the Red Scare concerns about his wife’s allegiances.

Overall a funny and thought-provoking early work.

*Originally intended to be the Biblical Judeo-Christian God but rewritten by Dick at the publisher’s request as a Muslim god of an obscure Arabic cult so as not to offend any readers of 1950’s America.

Cast of characters

• Jack Hamilton – employee at the California Maintenance missile research lab
• Marsha Hamilton – Hamilton’s wife
• Colonel Edwards – head of California Maintenance
• Charley McFeyffe – captain of security at California Maintenance
• Arthur Silvester – a war veteran. Creator of universe 1 overseen by the eye in the sky
• Bill Laws – the guide at the Bevatron particle accelerator
• Edith Pritchet – creator of the sexless and inoffensive universe 2
• David Pritchet – Edith’s son
• Joan Reiss – creator of the paranoiac universe 3
• Guy Tillingford – head of the Electronics Development Agency
• Horace Clamp – a prophet of the Second Bab
• Silky – a barfly Hamilton first meets in Silvester’s world

The post Eye in the Sky appeared first on the world Dick made.

In the 1990s a civil war has broken out between colonists on the moon and Earth. Time magazine’s 1996 Man of the Year Ragle Gumm is the only one who can predict where the missiles fired from the moon will land, and he’s able to keep Earth safe, that is until he has a change of heart and begins to side with the lunatics, as those on the moon are called.

A psychotic break follows and he regresses in his mind to the 1950s America of his childhood. The military then carefully constructs a fake 1950s small town filled with a few handlers along with a majority who are brainwashed into also thinking it’s real. Ragle still makes his predictions, although now it’s under the guise of a newspaper contest where he earns a 1950s wage figuring out Where Will the Little Green Man Be Next?

It would be easy to pick apart the book’s logic (how exactly does Ragle’s gift of prediction work and what do the strips of paper that Ragle finds when he begins to see through the simulated reality really mean?) but I love how Dick anticipated a baby boomer nostalgia for the 50s as he watched the Eisenhower years come to an end.

Cast of characters

• Ragle Gumm – all-time winner in the newspaper’s Where Will the Little Green Man Be Next? contest. Lives with his sister’s family
• Margo Nielson – Ragle’s sister
• Vic Nielson – Ragle’s brother-in-law
• Sammy Nielson – Vic and Margo’s young son
• Bill and Junie Black – Vic and Margo’s neighbors
• Stuart Lowery – Gazette representative
• Kay Keitelbein – neighborhood volunteer for Civil Defense
• Walter Keitelbein – Kay’s son
• The Kesselmans – Ragle encounters them in their house on the outskirts of town when he first tries to escape

The post Time Out of Joint appeared first on the world Dick made.

Back on the real Earth the pre-cog employees at P. P. Layouts try to determine which consumer goods will be popular so that they can be minified and sent to Mars for the colonists to use in their Perky Pat environments. This balance is upset when the industrialist Palmer Eldritch returns from the Proxima system with a potent new drug that he plans to market to the colonists as a more effective escape from the drudgery of Mars.

The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch remains my favorite PKD book even after having read them all. You might assume it was inspired by the use of LSD, but Dick claims to have not yet tried that particular drug at this point in his life. Instead, fueled by large quantities of amphetamines, he wrote this during an incredibly prolific two-year period in 1963-64 when he also wrote some of my other favorites including The Game Players of Titan, Now Wait for Last Year, The Simulacra and Clans of the Alphane Moon.

Is the world of Perky Pat the same world from The Crack in Space? Who knows, but while in the mind of Walt, one of the colonists catches Jim Briskin, everyone’s favorite newsclown (or maybe just mine), on TV.

Cast of characters

• Barney Mayerson – a pre-cog. Head of pre-fash marketing at  P. P. Layouts
• Roni Fugate – a pre-cog. Barney’s assistant and mistress
• Leo Bulero – chairman of the board at P. P. Layouts
• Emily Hnatt – Barney’s ex-wife
• Richard Hnatt – Emily’s current husband
• Palmer Eldritch – the interplan industrialist who returns from Proxima
• Sam Regan, Mary Regan, Tod Morris, Norman Schein, Helen Morris, Fran Schein – Mars colonists
• Allen and Charlotte Faine – disc jockeys in a Mars satellite
• Felix Blau – head of the police agency
• Dr. Wily Denkmal – runs an E therapy clinic in Germany

The post The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch appeared first on the world Dick made.

The LSD-inspired plot that follows has a great ending when we find out the colonists have been in a simulated reality all along. They are actually crew members of a ship stranded with no hope of rescue, and so they enter these computer-created artificial worlds again and again, with an amnesia of their actual plight, in order to pass the time before their inevitable death in space.

The religion they all follow in their invented world was generated by the ship’s computer. It resembles Christianity, although with a logic based on the existence of a physical God.

Cast of characters

• Ben Tallchief – Delmak-O’s naturalist
• Seth Morley – Delmak-O’s marine biologist
• Mary Morley – Seth’s wife
• Betty Jo Berm – Delmak-O’s linguist
• Bert Kosler – Delmak-O’s custodian
• Maggie Walsh – Delmak-O’s theologian
• Ignatz Thugg – Delmak-O’s thermoplastics expert
• Milton Babble – Delmak-O’s doctor
• Tony Dunkelwelt – Delmak-O’s photographer and soil-sample expert
• Glen Belsnor – Delmak-O’s electronics specialist and the group’s leader
• Roberta Rockingham – Delmak-O’s sociologist
• Susie Smart – Delmak-O’s clerk
• Wade Frazer – Delmak-O’s psychologist
• Ned Russell – Delmak-O’s economist

Other things to know

• How I Rose From the Dead in My Spare Time and So Can You – their religion’s holy book written by Communist theologian A. J. Specktowsky
• The Intercessor – a Christ-like manifestation of the deity
• The Mentufacturer – the God-like manifestation of the deity
• Walker-on-Earth – the ‘Holy ghost’ manifestation that completes the deity’s trinity
• Form Destroyer – the yin to the deity’s yang

The post A Maze of Death appeared first on the world Dick made.

Other than these brief moments The Divine Invasion is a mostly humorless story about a woman on a faraway colony planet who is impregnated by Yahweh who was driven there from Earth in 73 A.D. She travels back to Earth along with the Joseph stand-in Herb Asher and a reincarnated Elijah so that her soon-to-be-born son Emmanuel can overthrow Earth’s ruling powers and save mankind… or something along those lines.

It gets better in the second half when Zina transports them all to an alternate reality and there is some mystery about who/what Zina really is (Wisdom? A fairy queen? VALIS? Satan? Christ himself… which would make Emmanuel what?), but it still remains my least favorite book of the VALIS Trilogy.

Cast of characters

• Emmanuel – the reborn savior
• Elias Tate – Elijah reincarnated. Emmanuel’s guardian after Herb and Rybys die
• Herb Asher – Emmanuel’s ‘father’
• Rybys Rommey – Emmanuel’s mother
• Zina – the young girl who is Emmanuel’s friend
• Cardinal Fulton Statler Harms – Chief Prelate of the Christian-Islamic Church. Trying to use Big Noodle to verify St. Anselm’s Ontological Proof for the existence of God
• Nicholas Bulkowsky – Procurator Maximus of the Scientific Legate
• Linda Fox – intergalactic pop superstar, at least in the book’s beginning reality

Other things to know

• Christian-Islamic Church – formerly the Catholic Church
• Scientific Legate – formerly the Communist Party. One of the two ruling parties of Earth along with the C.I.C.
• Big Noodle – Earth’s great Artificial Intelligence

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